Veerasamy lives in a small village in southern India where all the inhabitants are dalits - outcasts or ‘untouchables' as they're known in India. Whole families of dalit people exist effectively as bonded or slave labourers. There are an estimated 100 million child labourers in India. Human rights organizations are now taking up the dalits' cause and, as Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu urges in the introduction to the film, calling for the end of a system of discrimination as heinous as the former apartheid system he and his generation fought against in South Africa.